You’ll find Optical Disc Archive solutions from Sony at work in a wide range of environments where speedy, reliable access to your precious data is crucial – along with effortless scalability and attractive ownership costs. Optical Disc Archive provides archiving solutions across seven key industries, from digital media asset management to healthcare, banking, education and more.
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Optical Disc Archive (ODA) is well known for its robustness and longevity. Across the globe, our customers are adopting Optical Disc Archive to keep their files safe and ensure peace of mind. Find out more about why our customers selected Optical Disc Archive – in their own words.
The whole system was deployed in a really short time, according to the Arts University deadlines, and the personnel received the necessary training to being able to get the best from VSN’s tools.
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Thanks to the stability and durability of ODA cartridges, the Vatican’s precious footage will be safe yet easily accessible for many years to come.
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“We'd been looking for solutions for several years until we found the right one in Sony.”
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“When launching new projects to air our company has a policy of using the most cutting edge, advanced technology in the world”
Read moreConsidered one of Latin America’s most advanced audio-visual production centres, discover how the Arts University of Ecuador is using Optical Case Archive.
The Arts University of Ecuador is a public institution that was created by the Ecuadorian government to offer its students a high profile educational centre for cinema, television and radio production, with the aim of enhancing the country’s artistic and cultural development. Today it is consider one of the most advanced audio-visual production centres in Latin America.
The University needed a easy-to-administer system, with a friendly interface for non-expert users and capable of adequately managing the student’s permissions and tasks.
The aim was to provide students with real, professional tools, adapted to the broadcast market in order to give them a full experience of the kind of environments that they will face in their professional careers.
The company selected to implement the solution was VSN, a specialist in media solutions and a Sony Optical Disc Archive alliance partner.
The system relies on VSNEXPLORER, VSN’s Media & Business Process Management solution, with 70 licences for concurrent users, integrated with the editors Avid Media Composer, Nitrix, Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere. It was also provided to the University an ISILON high level storage redundant system, formed by four X200 nodes with 24 TB each one, with eight 10GbE ports for editing, HD, 2K and 4K.
The robotic archive library is a Sony ODS with 130 slots and two drives, formed by a L30M unit with a L100B expansion module and two D77 fiber drives. All the system is managed by the Spider orchestration platform, developed by VSN, that allows for a redundant virtualized environment with four VSN Workers General servers for media transfer between different environments, four VSN Workers Transcoder dedicated servers for proxies creation, and three VSN Workers Carbon Coder servers dedicated for transcoding and format unification.
The platform allows for an efficient user and access permits management, the restriction of actions such as writing/reading/ cancelling and the defining of storage quotas, among others. The data communication system is formed by a 10GbE SWITCH that communicates every server, with two redundant switches with 48 GbE ports to which the client stations are connected.
The whole system was deployed in a really short time, according to the Arts University deadlines, and the personnel received the necessary training to being able to get the best from VSN’s tools.
Students now can study, practice and learn the most advances techniques in audio-visual contents management in a safe, stable and professional environment, receiving high education with the latest standards available in the broadcast market.
Discover how Sony's Optical Disc Archive is integrated into the workflow created by VDS
Video footage of special moments in the lives of the Popes are among the Vatican’s most precious assets. Thanks to Sony technology these irreplaceable records will soon be safer and more easily accessible than ever.
CTV (Centro Televisivo Vaticano) is the Vatican’s own TV station, established by Pope John Paul II in 1983. The station’s crews film the activities of the Holy Father and Holy See – the central government of the Roman Catholic Church. It produces its own programmes as well as providing footage for other broadcasters around the world and keeps an extensive archive for future use.
As part of a major project to digitise the Vatican’s records, the CTV team was keen to move towards tapeless storage. After carefully evaluating the various solutions on the market, they chose to invest in Sony technology.
The Sony solution is based on an Optical Disc Archive (ODA) library to be used in conjunction with integration and workflow orchestration platform Media Backbone Conductor (MBC).
The first stage of the project involves working together with third party suppliers to renew CTV’s master control room. Once the new systems have been installed the process to create a fully digital version of the existing video archive will begin, replacing tapes with ODA disc cartridges, each able to hold up to 1.5 terabytes of data.
Thanks to the stability and durability of ODA cartridges, the Vatican’s precious footage will be safe yet easily accessible for many years to come.
“Optical Disc Archive is very easy to use and a relatively inexpensive solution for us. With 30 Optical Disc Archive cartridges in the PetaSite library at any one time this perfectly fits our requirements.”
Perhaps unique among banking institutions and certainly among the first brands anywhere, Denmark's Jyske Bank (pronounced You-ska) has pioneered a communications strategy powered almost exclusively by video.
The bank has produced daily video content for its own web TV channel since 2006. Content is designed to communicate a variety of public relations and marketing messages with its customers and a wider audience. Video is also used internally to distribute corporate messages, training and information. Every week a live programme, 'Inside Live', is available to view by every employee. The core of the network is Jyskebank.tv, described as the go-to, interactive source for all those who wish to be informed on the latest financial happenings. It is a TV news channel delivering up-to-the-minute information on financial markets and breaking economic news.
The company refers to itself as both a bank and a media company and has won several awards for its approach. Its permanent broadcast team of 15 produces financial programming, in Danish and English languages, as well as compelling stories that the bank believes are relevant to its core audience of younger consumers and small enterprises. These include interviews with media personalities, footballers and even philosophers.
The bank houses a cutting-edge file-based TV studios located in the Danish city of Silkeborg and manages a string of correspondents filing live reports from locations worldwide including from the NASDAQ in New York's Times Square.
Every piece of content the company shares is embeddable or sharable on other sites. Because of this, 80 percent of Jyske’s content is viewed, not on its website or owned channels, but rather on outside sources, according to the company. This has helped it attract media partners from Mobile World Congress to the Cannes Lions.
Content has been produced digitally since 2006 and stored on Jyskebank.tv's internal Avid Interplay online system. Around three years ago the bank realised it needed a longer term solution to archive more than 6000 programmes and began investigating the options.
Steen Mertz, Director of Communications Technology explains “We have a lot of content stored on the Avid Interplay system and we decided to begin to move that into some other form of archive. In the long term we felt that the Interplay storage system would prove an expensive way to store content. A lot of the content is not in daily use so it was becoming a more and more expensive solution to grow the archive.
“We need to have some kind of record of what we've been doing but also we needed access to the archive so that we can pick and choose clips from previous productions. Keeping it all online however was neither economic nor a sensible use of storage space on the server.
“We'd been looking for solutions for several years until we found the right one in Sony.” Jyske Bank first tried a tape solution in a test phase for its future archive. “Even though we have significant amounts of content, compared to a national broadcaster we have a relatively small amount so for a data tape archive to have worked for us economically we would have had to purchase a large system.”
“We always make a point of searching the market at trade shows and we have a good relationship with Sony in Denmark,” says Mertz. “A year ago we also standardised on Sony SxS file-based media, switching from P2, and investing in PMW-500 camcorders to record content.”
“We felt that Sony was offering a more advanced set of technologies in keeping with the current and future direction of Jyske Bank,” he adds. “In addition we felt that the Sony Optical Disc Archive solution was more elegant [than data tape solutions] in its ability to access and retrieve content.”
Jyske Bank invested in an Optical Disc Archive PetaSite ODS-L30M 30-slot master library unit. The unit holds two ODS-D77F Optical Disc Archive fibre drives, 30 cartridges, and a built-in robotic mechanism in a 7U, 19-inch rack-mountable chassis. The ODS-L30M forms the basis of the PetaSite Optical Disc Archive. A total of five extension units can attach to the ODS-L30M to make up a single 42U library offering a maximum 535 cartridges (802 TB), depending on the extension units used.
The total archive solution is managed by Sony’s File Manager application. With five network clients, this provides a flexible, cost-effective and efficient method of archiving valuable assets for the long term, with minimal user involvement.
The Sony Optical Disc Archive system is ideal for deep archive where data tape does not provide the assurance or meet the need for write-once, very long-term archive requirements. It provides second copy archive at a remote site and is ideal for business continuity/disaster recovery, post house and production back-up and for video, film and stock footage archives or national archives. The system can also be used for news and sports clips that need to be near-online and as an on-line browse and proxy clip store.
“Optical Disc Archive is very easy to use,” explains Mertz. “The economics of our archive means Optical Disc Archive is a relatively inexpensive solution for us and it gives us some great possibilities of retrieving the content again. With 30 Optical Disc Archive cartridges in the PetaSite library at any one time this perfectly fits our requirements.”
The migration of content from the Optical Disc Archive began at the start of the summer 2014 and is nearing completion. Since the archive dated back eight years and included a mix of SD and HD content, a team was employed to not only manage that process but incorporate a quality control check on the content on ingest into Optical Disc Archive.
“We'd been looking for solutions for several years until we found the right one in Sony.”
Steen Mertz, Director, Communications Technology, Jyske Bank
N1 is the first regional news platform with centres in Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb, and an exclusive CNN affiliate for the region, focused on local news, offering 24 hours of professional, credible and accurate information from trusted journalists using the most advanced technology.
Launched this year it standardised its news-gathering and live broadcast operations on a range of Sony production equipment including XDCAM HD camcorders, studio cameras, vision switchers and the Optical Disc Archive for digital storage.
N1 operates through three major news production facilities (Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb) with smaller news hubs in cities throughout the region. Its editorial aim is to deliver 'vibrant, informative and compelling content to viewers.'
"Ours is a unique set-up in the region and possibly in Europe," said N1s Chief Technical Director, Igor Jovic. "Our news-gathering and broadcasting operations need the highest professional standards from day one, as well as co-ordination between three production centres, and that is what we get by standardizing on Sony equipment."
Under the agreement with CNN, N1 will be the exclusive news channel affiliate of CNN in the region. This gives N1 exclusive access to video and newsgathering resources from CNN International for transmission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia
Launched this year, N1 standardised its news-gathering and live broadcast operations on a range of Sony production equipment, including XDCAM HD camcorders, studio cameras, vision switchers and the Optical Disc Archive for digital storage..
Sony has supplied live production equipment and cameras to equip three studios and three control rooms in the capitals of all three countries, as well as XDCAM HD422 camcorders for electronic newsgathering. The in-house file format is MXF XDCAM 50Mb/s 422.
A core part of the N1 operation is a future-proofed and scalable archive solution which will integrate into daily content production.
"We are trying to achieve with the news channel something different to other TV news competitors in the region by innovating with new technology," says Jovic. "When it comes to archive, our thinking was that the most important thing was to have a good and reliable archive both now and in the future.
"We examined the use of digital tape storage, but selected Optical Disc Archive because we are 100 per cent sure that we can retrieve media it at any time in the future, something we are not sure of as current generations of tape archival media are superseded."
N1 invested in a Sony Optical Disc Archive solution, comprising the Optical Disc PetaSite ODS-L30M library, managed by middleware from XenData. The PetaSite library provides a current 136TB capacity, scalable to over 800TB, with the Optical Disc Archive media offering a 50-year archive lifetime.
The Sony Optical Disc Archive system is ideal for deep archive where data tape does not provide the assurance or meet the need for very long-term archive requirements. It is ideally suited for providing a second copy broadcast archive solution at a remote site and is ideal for business continuity/disaster recovery, post house and production back-up and for video, film and stock footage archives or AV national archives. The system can also be used for news and sports clips that need to be near-online and as an on-line browse and proxy clip store.
As the total archive solutions supplier, Sony delivered and implemented the system through local reseller and partner, ProVideo.
"With Optical Disc Archive it doesn't matter if technology advances - which it inevitably will - since we are future-proofed with storage going forward," explains Jovic. "As and when the next generation of drives are released we know that the Sony Optical Disc Archive strategy will work. Essentially we wanted to invest in a system at the outset so that we don't have to think about migrating our media to another system, or another version of a system, in five, ten or twenty years time.”
Platform confidence was not the only reason behind N1's technology choice. "Speed of access was vital," Jovic says. "Our production teams are revisiting older news recordings from the deep archive for a lot of material to supplement bulletins on a daily basis. Restoring material from the PetaSite Optical Disc Archive is not only reliable but it is fast, especially for the small size video files which we tend to produce. Each Optical Disc Archive disc can carry thousands of small files as well as full programmes, but the ability of production teams to search, access and retrieve particular content from the Optical Disc Archive efficiently was very important. It means that we can incorporate the archive as a living part of daily production and maximiseit as a resource.”
Sony Professional Solutions Europe provided the professional services for full system design, project management for the implementation of the XenData application and delivered the complete archive solution to meet N1’s required on-air date.
The 10,000 hours - and growing - archive library is interfaced to the IBIS iFind media asset management system via XenData middleware.
“All of our journalists now have the opportunity to see where their files are and from any desktop workstation they can pull files from the deep archive to central storage for editing and straight to air. The speed is incredible," says Jovic. Gone are the two-to-three days waiting for archived news material to be restored and available to the journalists to work with. The Sony PetaSite archive solution integrated with XenData middleware is a proven and reliable long-term archiving strategy.
The complete system offers a combination of flexibility, longevity and value. "When launching new projects to air our company has a policy of using the most cutting edge, advanced technology in the world,” says Jovic. “This enables us to not only become the number one news channel in our region but a leading news broadcaster internationally.” Sony PSE has delivered a total archive solution that meets the N1 strategic vision.
“Each Optical Disc Archive disc can carry thousands of small files but the ability of production teams to search, access and retrieve particular content from the Optical Disc Archive efficiently was very important. It means that we can incorporate the archive as a living part of the daily production and maximize it as a resource.”
Igor Jovic, Chief Technical Director, N1
Today’s media landscape is evolving with unprecedented speed and complexity. Optical Disc Archive helps broadcasters, platform owners and production specialists preserve their content, work smarter – and generate exciting new business opportunities from their precious media assets, today and tomorrow.
Broadcasters and production companies are faced with ever-increasing volumes of content to store, manage and safeguard. Optical Disc Archive is a key component in your media asset strategy – and it’s equally at home with simple projects or complex, large-scale production workflows.
Faster and more reliable than tape-based back-up, Optical Disc Archive drives down the real costs of long-term storage. ODA fits right into your existing workflow: and with 100 year media life there’s no need for specially controlled storage conditions or regular media migration.
Realise your content’s true worth. For broadcasters and archive owners, ODA is the robust, long-lasting choice for preservation and disaster recovery. Safeguarding your precious IP assets is crucial – and so is the ability to access them at a moment’s notice.
How many times have you tried to reduce what you put into archive because you just don’t have the capacity – or your hard drives are unreliable? With Optical Disc Archive you can back up the full project by consolidating from your NLE, and use a watch folder (and our free software) to archive directly to ODA.
Growing your capabilities, the services you offer, and the scale of your projects means growing your storage requirements for the amount of media you produce — but it shouldn’t mean bigger headaches. Optical Disc Archive is scalable and works with multiple third parties to fit into all user workflows.
Take the worry out of filling up your storage, but keep your archives as close as nearline as possible. So all your media is effectively available for immediate use.
Protect your footage as you shoot. Optical Disc Archive stores all rushes securely, replacing your hard drive and save your dailies. Store all rushes, then move them directly to the archive in one step, so they’re always available – and always safe.
Store data offline in ODA cartridge memory, while using ODA’s metadata tools to easily locate data files and access your data quickly.
ODA can become part of your online production system. There’s no need to wait while media is copied: you can try it in your project, waiting only for the relevant disc to load in seconds.
Optical Disc Archive presents an ideal choice for hospitals and healthcare trusts to preserve medical data. Video footage and still images captured during surgery and other clinical procedures can be stored for quick retrieval whenever it’s needed, along with associated patient records and other data.
Today’s video security and surveillance environments typically demand the secure storage of high-definition footage from a large number of network cameras. Optical Disc Archive cuts the cost and complexity of storing mission-critical video for near-instant review whenever it’s needed – now or far in the future.
From scientific research to industrial product design – academic institutions and commercial organisations have never been more reliant on preserving and accessing large volumes of data. Faster and more dependable than tape, Optical Disc Archive is equally suited to near-line storage and longer term archiving applications.
Everyone’s data is precious – not least for banks and financial services providers. Optical Disc Archive represents an optimum solution for secure, reliable on-site storage of transactional information and customer records, with effortless scalability and a media life of up to 100 years.
Optical Disc Archive allows schools, colleges and universities to store multimedia data from classroom presentations, online learning materials, lecture capture and more. Getting started is quick, easy and cost-effective – with solutions that scale to meet any educational establishment’s growing needs.
Dependable, cost-effective data storage and archive is a challenge for government departments, agencies and local authorities. Optical Disc Archive offers a near-line and long term storage solution that’s speedy, scalable, secure and future-proofed – with the reassurance of 100-year media life and compelling ownerships costs.
With Optical Disc Archive from Sony, your data’s in good hands – today and tomorrow. Get in touch and we’ll be pleased to discuss your own organisation’s storage, archiving and media asset management needs.
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